A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Saturday, October 13, 2007

BBC NEWS BROADCAST DISPROVEN CLAIM ABOUT WARMING

Dear BBC, Last night (Friday 12th Oct) on the BBC news a couple of minutes after 10 pm, while reporting on Al Gore's winning of the Nobel Prize the BBC used a line from his film that "nine of the 10 hottest years on record have been in the last 10 years". 2 months ago this was accepted as being unsupportable when the US accepted Stephen McIntyre's proof that figures, at least within the US which has the largest area with the most thorough records, purporting to prove this claim were wrong.

This Is clearly the most important fact to have emerged about the warming scare since, at least, Mr McIntyre proved the Hockey Stick of rapid warming to be based on false data & like that earlier news has been censored from BBC news reporting. Indeed since it disproves the central thesis of the warming scare - that significant indeed catastrophic warming is now taking place it can be argued that it is a more important news item than all the news stories published by the BBC on warming, taken together.

The BBC having substantial newsgathering resources cannot possibly be unaware of this latest finding now over 2 months old. Nonetheless such censorship is clearly a sin of omission.

More serious was the act last night of broadcasting the claim that 1998 was still recognised as being the warmest year without mentioning that it was untrue. Lying, unlike censorship, is a sin of commission.

The BBC have made some apologies recently for lying about the Blue Peter cat & the Queen. Lying about alleged global warming (now often rebranded as "climate change") is clearly many thousands of times more serious than, at least, the stuff about the cat.

In the circumstances I must demand that, on tonight's evening news you issue an equally prominent correction. What further action you take I will leave to your consciences. You might also consider making an apology for the rather silly claim on BBC news on the day of Gore's concert that "Al Gore is a climate scientist".

I await your prompt response, which, like this letter, I will be willing to put on my blog. Yours Sincerely Neil Craig

UPDATE Obviously the BBC have chosen not to correct their lie or indeed respond at all.

Friday, October 12, 2007

In a decision which makes the previous decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissenger look honourable, the committee have made a corrupt decision which must have Alfred Nobel spinning in his grave, awarding it jointly to Gore & the IPCC.

Meanwhile quite coincidentally our court has decided that his film has a number of not remotely truthful statements in it:

This internal memo from the BBC, published by CCNet, explains how the BBC is going to spin it

From Roger HarrabinBBC Environment Analyst

In any future reporting of Gore we should be careful not to suggest thatthe High Court says Gore was wrong on climate.......

We might say something like: "Al Gore whose film was judged by the HighCourt to have used some debatable science" or "Al Gore whose film wasjudged in the High Court to be controversial in parts".

The key is to avoid suggesting that the judge disagreed with the mainclimate change thesis.

I like the use of the word "debatable" to mean "clearly untrue". The suggestion that the BBC is anything other than a wholly corrupt state propaganda organisation deliberately spinning the facts is debatable - but the evidence absolutely shows that that is what it is.

As I was writing this the radio reported the court decision getting a soundbite from Greenpeace & not from the winner of the case.

Meanwhile, in a news item entirely censored by the BBC, ITV etc Stephen McIntyre, who disproved the Hockey stick graph has gone on to disprove the US figures purporting to show, as proof of at least some trend of warming, that 1998 was the warmest year for thousands of years up till then. It turns out that it was the warmest only for the last 64. While theoretically this doesn't affect figures outside the US in practice US records are far better kept over a wider area & longer period than anywhere else & it would not be credible to pretend the US alone was bucking the global trend.

This actually came about over 2 months ago. Consider the amount of coverage the media give to retread stories where Madonna, Sir David King or others of similar eminence make a remark about warming, or some minor researcher claims some unverified new scare. It is clear that this, which destroys the entire thesis that unprecedented, let alone catastrophic, warming is even taking place is being deliberately censored.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Currently the British government spends about £450 million on space - this being our contribution to the European Space Agency. A recent report from a committee of MPs strongly recommended that we increase our space budget. I doubt if anybody in the space advocacy movement would disagree but the real problem is not the amount of money being put into space development but how well, or rather badly, it is spent.

There has been legitimate criticism that NASA, which gets $16 billion (£8 billion) annually, has not been very effective at actually getting into space. By comparison the Russians spend about £800 million annually & are the only nation which currently has a capacity to continuously man the space station. NASA is regularly described as a jobs creation programme for bureaucrats & the southern states masquerading as a space programme. However compared to ESA they are a model of efficiency & success. ESA, combined with the nominally separate German & French space agencies, has a budget of £4.5 billion, half of NASA's & yet is still in the Sputnik era, not having yet managed, or even come close to, launching a single human into space. It is almost openly admitted that the only reason we contribute to the ESA gravy train is to ensure a significant share of the lucrative contracts it hands out - like most European projects it is more important that each nation get a share of the goodies than that it actually achieve anything.

If there is the constituency for more space spending, & the MP's support proves that there is, then the role of space advocates must be to ensure that it is actually spent on space & not co-opted to the EU gravy train. To allow such co-option would discredit any future spending on space in the public eye as it would be seen to achieve little or nothing.

Fortunately there is an alternative - the X-Prize.An X-Prize is a prize awarded for a specific technological achievement, with no strings attached but with no payment made until the goal is achieved. It is thus left up to private individuals & companies to to decide how & whether to compete, without government committees having to say whether sufficient investigation had been made to prove one project sufficiently superior to the previous government project to actually try it, This has been spectacularly successful in the case of Burt Rutan & Spaceship One, where a $10 million prize enabled the first private sub orbital launch, which in turn is being parlayed into Richard Branston's Virgin Galactic space tourism business. $10 million being 0.0006th of NASA's annual budget. Historically similar prizes funded Lindberg's first crossing of the Atlantic & John Harrison's development of a way of measuring longitude. Such prizes have a record of achieving spectacular results at orders of magnitude less cost than conventional projects organised by government bureaucracy - which may explain why government bureaucracies tend not to be keen on them. Another advantage such prizes have is that if they don't succeed they don't cost a single penny - unlike most government projects where failure means increased budgets.

Dr Jerry Pournelle, who has the experience to know, has gone on record to say that he could solve the space access problem with the following government X-Prizes:

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

FORTH TUNNEL PRICE FAKERY

Some time ago I made an FOI inquiry to the Scottish Executive as to how the government's costing of a tunnel under the Forth of £4673 million had been arrived at when the Norwegians had been able to build hundreds of kilometres of tunnels at between £3.5 & £11 million a kilometre.

Neat. It proves that the civil service can make the figures jump through hoops to provide any answer they want.

Note that the actual cost of the tunnel is acknowledged to be 1 billion & the tunnel & roadbuilding come to only 29.5% of the total bill. This is, at least by comparison, relatively close to the figure of £250 suggested by Mr Roy Pedersen or the £500 million suggested by FTAG & various engineers on online discussions in the Scotsman. I have not been given more detailed figures of how the actual building is costed but if it has the same generous allowances for paperwork costs as these calculations I can well see that a more demanding calculation could come in at the lower independent figures.

Looking at these individually

(2) Why should building roads to the tunnel mouth cost this improbable figure? In fact I was given a more detailed breakdown of this & since almost all the expenditure on roads comes in the 2014-2017 period while most of the cost incurred on building the actual tunnel comes in 2011-2013 the 7.5% inflation indexing means that the road proportion is even higher. Iincluding this inflationary factor, the roads & TS budget come to half as much as the tunnel itself. This means that, all the other costs being expenses proportional to the building costs, building roads will have a total cost of £1600 million. Assuming that a bridge will also require roads leading up to it this means that a flat £1600 million will also apply to roads to it. Since the bridge is calculated at £2,500 million this means that the bridge plus all the extra factors will cost £1 billiion or the actual building of the bridge must come to a mere £295 million. Isn't Scottish engineering wonderful! This magnificent feat would only be possible, of course, if the civil servants were calculating the cost of a tunnel on exactly the same basis as the bridge - but of course we must assume that is what they are doing since anything else would be fraud.

(3) I am assured that "contingency costs called Optimism Bias" are "required by HM government Treasury Guidance" though I have not ben told whether the Treasury insists they be 1/3rd of the actual building ocsts or indeed whether they must be separate from the 10% contingency (4) more common in the industry - note that because the Bias increases costs by 1/3rd this in turn increases the contingency to 13% of the actual doing things cost.

(5) I am not sure that Transport Scotland's oversight of this scheme really justifies their £100 million budget.

(7) VAT is perfectly fair though since it is merely a bookkeeping exercise between government departments it would be reasonable to suggest that the Treasury forego part of it. No wealth is actually created or lost in charging VAT & it would be a pity if a government project were to be cancelled because the government cannot afford to pay the government their own extra taxes on it.

(9) The government are indexing all their costs on the assumption of a 7.5% inflation rate. They must know something we & the Treasury, don't.The Treasury says 2%. An interesting effect of this is that while the government are saying work will not start on this till 2011/12 if it were to start immediately we would save 3 years of 7.5% inflation(compounded to 24.2% or 19.5% of the final figure) - this would, in the government's theory, cut the cost of a tunnel by £910.

(10) I have no idea what "additional capital charges" are or why they should be introduced. or indeed why they should cost £545 million. The more detailed year by year breakdown shows that 2/3rd of this additional capital is only introduced from 2014 when most of the expense of the actual tunneling has been done.

These figures have all been officially calculated on "Quarter 4 2006" prices which suggests to me that it was all fixed up before the SNP, who came out for a tunnel during the election campaign, got there.------------------------------------------------------------------------------I believe these figures bear no real relationship at all to what a tunnel could actually cost. By comparison I have pointed out before that the Norwegians have been able to build tunnels at as little as £3.5 million a kilometre & that the Danes & Germans are colaborating on a 20 kilometre bridge costed at £3.7 - & take 12 years. If they are making the same assumption about inflation as our own government prices will have doubled by then meaning that the current cost of their proposed bridge would be £1.8 billion Perhaps the Danes & Germans, unlike the Scottish Office, don't expect 7.5% inflation.

What we should do, instead of having this fraudulent comparison is to throw an open competion for a fixed price contract for a crossing. Let the world's civil engineering companies make open bids, our government guarnateeing only to pay for land & government legal & regulatory costs & see what bids are made.

I have shown before how the cost of the original Forth Road Bridge was £15 million & how at real world inflation rates this would equate to £360 million today not the 8 times greater figure we see being foisted on us. Until such contracts are awarded openly & open to the world we are going to see such massive artificial increases continue.

My own highest estimate of a tunnel cost, based on the highest Norwegian priice of £11 million would be £11 million X 3 (assuming a 3 kilometre tunnel to achieve depth) X 2 (2 lanes) X 2 (assuming extra large motorway sized tunnels) X 2 (allowing high fixed start up costs buying equipment for this one project not currently available) x 121% (2% inflation over 10 years) = £319 million. If it was decided to use the same equipment to make a series of tunnels as per my Scottish Tunnels Project the last doubling would disappear. One suggestion that has been made is to convert Rosyth dockyard to manufacture sections for a tunnel laid across the seabed - obviously if this were done only for the Forth Tunnel all the costs would accrue to it whereas if it was used to create such tunnels to the Scottish Isles etc this cost would be spread very wildely. If the basic cost was £3.5 milliion, like the basic Norwegian price a Forth Tunnelt could cost as little as £26 million without start up costs.

I will be forwarding this article to interested parties. It may be that somebody in Transport Scotland or in Scottish politics or business will be able to dispute these figures or verify the government's ones - we shall see.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

The latest prediction from Electoral Calculus shows the LibDems getting no seats at all on their current average poll rating (13%).

This is a mere 2 years after expelling me on the grounds that I was a traditional economic liberal & also believed that the insane policy of pretending we could have large scale constant power from intermittent & small scale windmills was unwise. To quote myself (always a source of inspiration) speaking for nuclear power at Conference in 2001 to say that we could rely on windmills "would be & would in time be seen to be grossly irresponsible". The electorate are not fools & are, on most things, genuinely liberal minded & would have voted for them had they been genuinely progressive. Indeed it was for being closer to economic liberals, rather than for supporting independence, that the SNP won the last Scottish election.

This collapse is not merely or even primarily because Ming is useless but because the party has adopted lunatic policies & driven out genuinely liberal & progressive members.

I regret more than readers can realise that a party which my father devoted his political life to supporting has been taken over by eco-fascists totally opposed to liberal principles & destroyed by them. I do not think it is now possible to save the party & I would advise those MPs & MSPs who believe in something close to traditional liberalism to leave either individually to some other party or, better yet, collectively (as the Liberal Unionists did last century, as part of an electoral pact. Going down with a sinking ship can be an honourable choice but not if it is flying a false flag.

Monday, October 08, 2007

SPUTNIK ANNIVERSARY LETTER

I had the following letter published in last Thursday's Guardian (4th Oct anniversary of Sputnik & also in the Metro. It went out to most of the national newspapers though only these 2 somewhat different papers used it. However since it got the prime place (top lefthand corner) in the Guardian I am rather pleased - this is the first time i have appeared in that paper - perhaps they aren't keen on letters on economic success, the need for nuclear or indeed the undesireability of our genocidal Nazi allies. Since the Guardian is the paper of choice of our ruling bureaucrats & the Metro is a free paper distributed on trains 7 buses in Glasgow I doubt if there is much crossover though the Metro probably has the higher readership.

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Today (4th Oct) is the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the first time human beings put anything into space orbit. 12 years later men walked on the Moon.

A comparison with aircraft, where 50 years after the first flight we had achieved twice the speed of sound & passenger jet airlines were in service, is instructive. Today NASA promises to be able to return to the Moon in 13 years, & has been promising this or more for 30 years. The problem is not so much a shortage of money but of how it is used. NASA with a budget of £8 billion has been described as a jobs creation programme for bureaucrats & the southern states which occasionally does some stuff in space. By comparison with Europe, whose combined budget is £5 billiion & has not yet allowed them to launch a human they look positively animated. Russia, on the other hand, with a budget of £650 million actually has a greater launch capacity than even the US. Britain's budget of £210 million, largely given to ESA, is aimed fairly openly not at going anywhere but at ensuring a share of ESA contracts.

The good news is that a $10 million "X-Prize" awarded for the first independent launch has virtually created Virgin Galactic & the space tourism industry - that is what NASA spends every 5 1/2 hours or Europe in 10. Experts have said that an X-Prize of only £1 billion would produce a shuttle capable of at least weekly launches. This is what Britain already spends on space every 5 years. By comparison with what we spend on wars or windmills this is chickenfed (& as for what we spend on farm subsidies)!. With even a little vision humanity could get back on that 50 year track that aircraft builders pioneered. Yours Faithfully Neil CraigReferencesVarious space budgets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency#Overall_budgetUK budget of £210 million http://www.bis-spaceflight.com/sitesia.aspx/page/1191/l/enWhat could be achieved by X-Prizes http://www.jerrypournelle.com/topics/gettospace.html